Woody Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” Mark F
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ISSN 2053-8804 Woody Guthrie Annual, 3 (2017): Fernandez: Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” “The Only Way That I Could Cry”: Woody Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” ! !Mark F. Fernandez Woody Guthrie wrote about everything. He even coined a motto about it at the end of his most famous lyric sheet: “All you can write is what you see.”1 And he saw just about everything there was to see of the mid-twentieth-century American experience. His famous travels took him throughout most of the then forty-eight states, and like so many Americans of his day, World War II acquainted him with life on the high seas, the coasts of Africa, and parts of Europe. As he wrote about the things he saw and the causes he came to embrace, Guthrie developed an approach to the songwriting process that he shared with anyone who would listen and even some that probably did not want his advice at all. That approach has gone on to influence generations of songwriters ever since — their legion is often dubbed “Woody’s Children.” Peers like Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, who would go on to form the influential folk/pop group The Weavers, recorded Woody’s songs, emulated his songwriting process in their own work, and helped spark a “folk revival” that energized the 1950s and 60s. Young entertainers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Bob Dylan sought out and copied Guthrie as they developed their own craft. More recently, artists like Billy Bragg, Jay Farrar, and Jonatha Brooke have counted Guthrie as a major influence and have even adapted his unpublished lyrics in some of their recordings as well as incorporating his “all you can write is what you see” mentality into their own creative processes. Guthrie’s influences on American songwriting demands a close investigation of his process and his ideas about crafting songs. No discussion of Guthrie’s songwriting can ignore the vast scholarship investigating the themes behind his work. Folklorists Alan Lomax and John Greenway pioneered efforts to inform the world of Woody’s importance as a folk songwriter. More recently, outstanding studies that tell the history of how he developed themes in writings by distinguished scholars such as Mark Allan Jackson, Ronald D. Cohen, Will Kaufman, Greg Vandy, and John Shaw have elaborated on, improved, and continued that tradition. These writers have looked at the significance of Guthrie’s catalog, his influences, the social causes he championed in song, and the backdrop of the history of the periods in which he wrote. Even though there’s no shortage of interest in Guthrie’s life and work, investigation of his approaches to songwriting and the advice he gave to the world about making up what he liked to call “balladsongs” is still worthy of closer scrutiny. "41 ISSN 2053-8804 Woody Guthrie Annual, 3 (2017): Fernandez: Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” Early on, Alan Lomax recognized the significance and scope of Woody’s abilities. In a letter to Harold Spivacke, the head of the Library of Congress’s music division, Lomax wrote: “. allow me to say that the group with which Mr. Guthrie is working is continually experimenting with the development and extension of the medium of American folk song . .”2 Lomax correctly identified Guthrie and his collaborators in the Almanac Singers as an integral part of the continuing “folk process” and as contributors to the ever-growing catalog of American song. Since then, others have accepted and embraced Lomax’s view. A young Bob Dylan, after reading Woody’s seminal memoir Bound for Glory, dropped out of college and moved to New York to meet Woody and learn at the feet of the master. Woody was nearly gone then, unable really to play or communicate very effectively as a result of a terrible arm injury from a fire and the onset of Huntington’s disease; but he still captivated Dylan, who would go on to emulate Woody’s songs and his approach to writing in his own career. In the 1960s, as the “Folk Revival” matured, more scholars began to examine Guthrie’s importance as so many giants of the revival paid homage to the master. John Greenway reflected on Woody’s songwriting legacy in a 1966 article written shortly after the United States Department of the Interior announced that it was granting Guthrie its Conservation Service Award and naming a Bonneville Power Administration substation in his honor. Greenway lamented the fact that Guthrie was still relatively unknown, indeed not nearly as well recognized as his protégés like Bob Dylan, and pointed out that a recent Newsweek article had described Woody’s son Arlo as “playing a harmonica, ‘suspended Dylan-style around his neck.’ O tempora! O mores! Bob Dylan learned this posture from Woody!” For Greenway, who earlier had described Guthrie as “the greatest figure in American folksong,” this lack of recognition was truly tragic. He also pointed out: “The literary men tell us that every poet has his ten years. Guthrie had his decade; before 1938 he was not yet Woody Guthrie; after 1948 he was no longer Woody Guthrie.” But he had his ten years. Greenway also reflected on Guthrie’s process of writing songs in cyclical bursts such as Dust Bowl Ballads and the tremendous outpouring of work in his month-long stint writing for the Bonneville Power Administration (the songs that led to the conservation award) as demonstrating “a rush of genius poured into twenty-six songs in twenty-eight days.” And he opined: “The range of subject, treatment, and mood in Guthrie’s songs was as far- reaching as his own footsteps over his country.”3 In recent years, scholars have begun exploring Woody’s writings more closely, focusing deeply on the range of his subjects and themes. Mark Allan Jackson, in Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie, takes a bold, holistic approach to Guthrie’s "42 ISSN 2053-8804 Woody Guthrie Annual, 3 (2017): Fernandez: Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” writing by exploring major topics in his voluminous catalog. Jackson investigates the maturation of Guthrie’s work from his earliest efforts to his later sketches during his long hospitalization for Huntington’s disease at the end of his life. Although Jackson examines a wide range of themes, he focuses deeply on Guthrie’s efforts “to record the wrongs of which he knew and to point out the paths that he thought the nation could take in order to improve the lot of its underclass.” He sees Guthrie as not only a recorder of the inequities and injustices that he saw in his travels, but also as an optimist “looking forward to a time and a place when and where all people have homes and jobs, plenty to eat, freedom to speak their minds, and equal status under the law — regardless of race or gender or class.”4 For Jackson, Guthrie truly was a “prophet singer.” Ronald D. Cohen, in Woody Guthrie: Writing America’s Songs, provides a broad overview of Guthrie’s themes throughout the twenty productive years of his career as well as an important assessment of his rediscovery during the Folk Revival and his influences on contemporary artists across a variety of musical styles — from Americana singer-songwriters like Jimmy LaFave to pop stars such as John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen to soul icons like Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and even international artists like Germany’s Hans Eckardt-Wenzel. From Guthrie’s friends like Pete Seeger (who once famously began a letter to Guthrie, “Dear Woody, my friend and teacher”5 and whose essay “Remembering Woody” is reprinted in Cohen’s book) to contemporary musician activists like Rage Against the Machine’s, Tom Morello, Cohen vividly reveals again and again Guthrie’s powerful influences on American song.6 Will Kaufman, in two outstanding books, Woody Guthrie, American Radical and Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues, delves deeply into two important aspects of Guthrie’s writings and art.7 In American Radical, Kaufman investigates Guthrie’s road from his middle-class roots to his role as an activist for labor and civil rights. He explores Woody’s “awakenings” as a youth as he came to grips with inequities growing up in Okemah, Oklahoma and Pampa, Texas, to his life on the road and visits to the labor camps that led to his seminal Dust Bowl Ballads. Kaufman also traces Guthrie’s long and difficult journey to come to grips with his own racist ideas as he dealt with the possible part his father Charley might have played in the lynching of the Nelson family in Okemah the year before Woody was born, through to his own witnessing of the Peekskill riots in New York State in 1949. Although Kaufman’s book explores a wide variety of topics including Guthrie’s journalistic writing, his emphasis on how the growth of radical ideas influenced Guthrie’s songwriting remains constant throughout this deeply nuanced book. From bringing the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants to light in ballads such "43 ISSN 2053-8804 Woody Guthrie Annual, 3 (2017): Fernandez: Guthrie and the Writing of “Balladsongs” as “Tom Joad,” to his many union songs, to his deeply moving investigation of Woody’s ideas toward race in the pivotal chapter “Long Road to Peekskill,” Kaufman again and again gives credence to how Guthrie’s observations of American life influenced both his art and his radicalism. In the Peekskill chapter especially, he investigates what Greenway identified as Guthrie’s cyclical approach to songwriting as well as how the causes he embraced influenced the art that he made.8 In Modern World Blues, Kaufman exposes the world to Woody Guthrie, the “all you can write is what you see” artist who is influenced by the modernity he encountered throughout his life, as well as arguing for his emergence as a “modernist” artist in the tradition of T.